IBM to Deliver Mobile E-Commerce Content

IBM Corp. Friday continued to assemble its wireless initiative by forming
alliances with eight of the industry’s top Internet service firms to build
mobile e-commerce solutions.

As a result of the deal AGENCY.COM, answerthink Consulting Group Inc.,
Luminant Worldwide Corp., Organic Inc., R/GA Interactive, Rare Medium Group Inc. , Razorfish, Inc.
, and US
Interactive Inc.
will put IBM’s
mobile e-commerce software to work delivering content and services through
mobile phones and other portable Internet-enabled appliances.

IBM will invest in special support programs tailored to meet the needs of
eight Internet service firms, which last year generated more than $1
billion in combined revenues for consulting, Web design and integration
services.

In return, these content companies agreed to build a percentage of their
wireless web solutions on IBM middleware, the software layer that provides
communication between different operating systems and the applications
businesses use to run their companies.

Mark Hanny, IBM’s Web Integrator Initiative vice president, said in a few
years more than 60 percent of all Web transactions will be triggered by
wireless devices.

“Mobile e-commerce represents a tremendous opportunity for businesses to
provide new personalized, location-based services over the Internet,” Hanny
said. “These companies will have tremendous influence over which platforms
businesses use to create content and services for these devices, and we’re
committed to provide them with the support they need to develop and deploy
wireless solutions using IBM hardware and software.”

David Flaxman, answerthink managing director of
e-commerce, said if a company is not already planning for wireless
deployment they are behind the curve.

“The concept that you should not have to redeploy content for every
existing and potential device is a compelling one. IBM’s approach, through
standardized transcoding, combined with IBM’s end-to-end suite of
e-commerce products provides a powerful enterprise-to-anywhere toolset,”
Flaxman said. “Answerthink is focused on technology leadership and the
Pervasive Computing Partnership will be a core part of answerthink’s
Advanced Technology Practice.”

Chetan Sharma, Luminant principal, said the
scalability, integrated application services and comprehensive range of
features available with IBM’s Application Framework make it the natural
choice as a development platform for our mobile e-commerce solutions.

“Luminant intends to be a leader in bringing the desktop to wireless
devices and is making significant commitments to this new web frontier,”
Sharma said. “IBM is a natural partner for us in this arena. Together, we
can bring advanced, flexible and cost effective solutions to a marketplace
that will be hungry for them.”

The eight Web agencies will participate in a variety of wireless training
sessions and joint marketing business development programs with IBM. They
will also be able to leverage IBM research and have access to IBM’s
customer-building sales channels.

Initially, the companies will use IBM’s WebSphere Everyplace Suite as a
foundation for the mobile solutions they develop for clients. IBM’s
flagship wireless server software delivers mobile Internet solutions to
non-traditional computing devices, including wireless handsets.

The middleware features content delivery functions that auto

matically
translate Web data into an appropriate format that can be read from
handheld devices. Other features include data synchronization software to
keep content current across multiple devices and subscription managers to
track and serve customers through multiple wireless protocols, including
Wireless Application Protocol.

In May, IBM introduced its wireless real-time software that enables
businesses to create online marketplaces to interact with handheld devices
like mobile phones, PDAs, and pagers.

The software provides a fully integrated e-commerce solution for
integrating buyers and sellers in an electronic marketplace. In addition,
the software securely communicates with wireless devices through the
support of the WAP and Short Message Services.

By extending essential business-to-business transactions to wireless
devices, participants can remain engaged from anywhere, thereby increasing
market efficiency and improving inventory liquidity.

While nay-sayers contend that the “wireless Web” is more myth than
material, wireless Web search provider Pinpoint.com announced that its served
up more than 1.5 Million WML Pages early in April.

The wireless Web infrastructure provider said that Pinpoint’s wireless
search engine increased from 150,000 WML documents to over 1.5 million
documents in less than a month.

Jud Bowman, Pinpoint.com president said it has a unique vantage point into
the growth of the wireless Web.

“Just over the past month we have seen a ten-fold increase in WML content,”
Bowman said. “This is a tremendous milestone that quantifies what wireless
experts have been predicting for a long time, the wireless Web is truly the
Internet’s next frontier.”

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